Sasha Polakow-Suransky '01 arrived at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship in October 2003 expecting to be on his own, figuring that four years of liberal learning at Brown had fully prepared him for the independent nature of graduate research.
"Coming from Brown, I thought I'd seen the height of independence and lack of structure," Polakow-Suransky said. However, "Oxford doctoral programs really trump Brown" in that regard.
Now in his third year of a three-year doctoral program, Polakow-Suransky has spent only six of the past 12 months at Oxford, using the rest of this time to conduct fieldwork in South Africa and Israel. His modern history dissertation will focus on the history of Israeli-South African relations during the apartheid years, looking at military and government relations between the two countries from the 1960s to 1994. This research has led to a wide range of interviews with former Israeli ambassadors to South Africa and high-ranking British officials in both countries. In addition, he has met with "the top brass" of South Africa's apartheid-era military establishment - "not the people I usually hang out with," he joked.
"It's pretty normal" for students at Oxford "to run off to all sorts of places and do field research" for extended periods of time, particularly students pursuing international relations or area studies, Polakow-Suransky said.
"It's kind of what you're expected to do," he said. "You go and gather all your archival material and your interview material, and in the third year you come back and you write and write and write and hope that you finish. I guess I didn't realize how individualistic (England's) graduate education system is."
Fellow Rhodes Scholar Olivia Rissland '04 said that although she has spent much of her time at Oxford in the research lab, she encountered a similar level of independence when she began a doctorate program last year.
"Since I'm in the lab and I'm not taking any classes, there's no term structure at all," said Rissland, who conducts molecular biology research. "I just sort of go in and leave and go in the next day."
For his part, former Marshall Scholar Jonathan Levitsky '90 said he appreciated the academic environment at Oxford, where "a bunch of high-intensity people" are "encouraged to do something different." Levitsky completed a two-year master's program in political science after graduating from Brown.
"There's sort of nothing else that people are trying to accomplish out of the experience other than enjoying your time there," Levitsky said. "You do all this in a context where the results really don't matter."
For Rissland, the most difficult transitions have been cultural rather than academic. "Labs are really similar. The difference is whether you take a coffee break or a tea break," she said. "I guess I kind of knew about (the academic) aspect going into it."
And though Oxford's culture is somewhat similar to Brown's, "every once in a while you just get an overwhelming sense of just not really belonging here," Rissland said.
Jasmine Waddell '99, a former Rhodes Scholar, said she noticed dramatic differences between U.S. and English universities.
"Rhodes Scholars are essentially 32 21- to 22-year-olds exiled for two years to an island which hates the U.S. and has very different cultural norms," she said.
But Rissland said the differences are smaller.
"I think it's not actually as big a change as you think," she said of studying in a different country. "Everyone still hates Bush. ... But all the little things are really different. It just makes you feel a little bit more like an outsider than anything you would've expected. Really small things like buying tomato sauce are all of a sudden much more difficult."
Terri Evans, who handles Marshall Scholarship applications from the New England region as press officer for the British Consulate General, said culture shock is a common experience for past Marshall recipients.
"It's very easy for an American student who is planning to study in the U.K. to forget that the U.K. is a different country," Evans said. As a result, some students struggle to "come to grip with the differences in culture, large and small."
Still, "England is a really great place," Rissland said. "It's a really easy place to be happy."
Pursuing a doctorate in science "is pretty different from any other degree because it's all research-based," she said. "Before going over, I knew what lab I wanted to work in. I arrived and a week later was already starting to work on my project."
Unlike doctorate programs at U.S. universities, England's programs require very little coursework, which reduces their length considerably. "You can theoretically finish in three years because it's all research from day one," Polakow-Suransky said, adding that an American doctorate program would likely take him five years to complete.
Marshall Scholar Ryan Roark '05 will launch a similar program when she leaves in two weeks for the University of Cambridge. She will begin graduate work in oncology, studying cancer and tumors, pursuing a course of study that she would have had trouble finding in the United States.
"They have an academic approach to oncology that's kind of rare here," she said. "There's a cross-disciplinary approach that's only starting to make it to American universities."
If she were to pursue oncology in the United States, "I would be taking two years of classes and four years of research to get a Ph.D.," she said. "There, I have to choose which lab I'm going into before I get to Cambridge."
Master's degrees seem to be a more common goal than Ph.D.s for U.S. fellowship students. The majority of Rhodes Scholars opt to study for two years, completing a master's program before returning to the United States. Polakow-Suranksy said he is one of maybe five Rhodes Scholars out of his 32-person class who will still be at Oxford this year.
Kingston Reif '05, who will soon head to the London School of Economics as a Marshall Scholar, said he plans to pursue an 11-month master's program in international relations. Reif will enroll in a "taught" program that emphasizes coursework over research.
"It's far more seminars" than doctorate work would entail, Reif said. In his class of 43 Marshall Scholars, only seven will pursue a Ph.D.
Rissland estimated that about a quarter of her class is doing doctorate work, adding that "most people who are doing science end up going for a Ph.D." Still, the majority in the humanities pursue master's degrees, she said.
Life after the fellowship
If he hadn't received the Rhodes Scholarship, Polakow-Suranksy - who spent two years writing for the liberal monthly the American Prospect after graduating from Brown - would probably still be in journalism, and he plans to return. Though he plans to publish a book based on his dissertation, he is not likely to pursue a purely academic career. "I really want to get back into journalism, to be honest," he said. "I'm not averse to the idea of teaching, but I'm definitely more interested in a career in journalism than in academia."
These aspirations differ from many of his peers. "A lot of them are at law school or medical school at Harvard or Yale now," Polakow-Suransky said of his class. "They had it planned out in advance and they deferred it. I didn't have a contingency plan in that sense."
Rissland said she plans to keep her options open. "I basically went into this kind of not committing myself mentally to medical school," she said. "It's really hard to see that there's a future after Oxford while you're there because it's just so all-encompassing."
Though "the largest plurality" of Rhodes Scholars continue to pursue academic research or teaching, their career paths have diversified somewhat over the years, according to Elliott Gerson, American Secretary of the Rhodes Trust. Until the 1960s, a vast majority went on to work at colleges and universities.
"Now it's probably about a third, with the remainder going into law, medicine, journalism, nonprofit administration and business," Gerson said. "Virtually no Rhodes Scholars went into business through the 1970s, and we've seen a slight increase in the last few decades."
Evans said she has noticed similar trends among past Marshall recipients, who are "increasingly doing something other than primarily academic tracks."
Many Marshall Scholars pursue careers related to public service, Evans said.
"If there's a common denominator, it's that many of them in some form have a larger public element," she said. "It plays to one of the things that's a hallmark of Marshall Scholars, which is a sense of your role as an agent of change in the larger world."
Levitsky attended Yale Law School after receiving his master's degree at Oxford. He followed that up with foreign policy work under the Clinton administration, spending time in the Balkans during the Kosovo conflict. He switched to private practice following President George W. Bush's election in 2000.
After students complete a competitive fellowship, they may find that their experiences have set them apart from peers who followed more traditional post-graduate paths.
"I think it's important to keep in mind that they're taking themselves out of typical career trajectories," said Linda Dunleavy, Brown's fellowship director and associate dean of the college. "Students who go to Oxford or Cambridge for two to three years sometimes have to work harder at reintegrating into (career) circles."
Waddell said she had some difficulty upon her return to the United States.
"One of the hardest things is coming back and re-integrating into the U.S. as a Rhodes Scholar with pretty remarkable experiences and still be a normal person," she said.
But the prestige associated with these fellowships "clearly makes up for that loss," Dunleavy said.
